


Perfection

by Toxic_Waste



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Doomed Timelines, Gen, Missing Scene, One Shot, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:41:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21697888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: Everything is perfect in Entrapta's life. She lives alone her castle, no one bothers her and the war stays far away. It's been two decades since she's even seen another person.And it's just the way she likes it.
Kudos: 15





	Perfection

Entrapta woke up in a good mood. Now, this was hardly out of the ordinary, as far as her mornings typically went. Still, there was something even gooder than usual about this good mood - so good that she might even hazard calling it the best of moods. 

Mornings were great. 

Stretching, she rolled out of her nest and tumbled to the floor, catching herself by pigtail inches before hitting the ground. 

There was a lot to do today - she was planning on finishing several experiments last night that she’d just been too tired to continue, on starting several new ones - and there was a bunch of miscellaneous repairs that needed doing, too. Castle Dryl was an old building, the eastern wall repeatedly gave her trouble … at this point, she’d determine to just demolish the whole thing and put up a brand new buttress in its stead. It was going to be so much fun. 

Entrapta laughed: a loud, uncouth sound that echoed and echoed off the stone walls until it abruptly terminated in snort as she burst from her room and stalked through the vents, headed for the kitchen. Breakfast time came first, generally. Pancakes! Little ones, no bigger around than the breadth of her thumb pad. 

On the way there, she stopped at the counting room. Although it’s real purpose (and name, for that matter), had long since been lost to time, she called it the counting room. 

It was a calendar, of sorts. Entrapta had lots of calendars: most of them were a lot more advanced and automatic than this one was. And they were awesome, and she loved them with the love that she showered on everything she’d ever built. But they were for a different purpose, even so. 

This one was special, for it tracked not the time, not exactly -- instead, it tracked her age, day by day. She counted the tallies every so often. At last count, there had been 8,594 marks on the wall. Just a little bit over twenty-three years’ worth, in fact. She wasn’t sure exactly how young she was when she’d started it, but it had been pretty young. She liked to guess around five, usually.

Today wasn’t a counting day, though. So she only stopped briefly to trace a few hairs over the very bottommost scratches before lifting herself up and using her wrench to make a nice indentation in the bricks there.

That being done, then: it was time to get the morning more fully into gear. Breakfast… breakfast. Entrapta was hungry, and there was a full day ahead of her that she could hardly wait to start on.

Today could possibly be the best day ever.

“No, you don’t understand!” Entrapta said frustratedly, gesturing with her hair and trying to come to some semblance of agreement with Catra, who seemed to be having none of it. “You have to look at the readings! You’ll see what I mean!”

“It’s not that I don’t  _ know _ ,” Catra snarled. “But that I don’t  _ care _ .” Scorpia winced in the background. “We are opening that portal, and we are doing it  _ now _ . Nothing is going to keep me from this -- not Adora, not Hordak, not Shadow Weaver… and especially not  _ you _ .”

Entrapta grimaced. She really didn’t mind Catra too much, but there were always edge cases where things were clearly just going over the woman’s head.

“Move!” she exclaimed abruptly, shoving past a clearly stunned Catra. “I have to talk to Hordak, he’ll know what to-  _ yaaaaaa _ !”

The sound was involuntary, the convulsions even more so, as a powerful bolt of something slammed through her body from behind. It felt like her chest had been crushed by a boulder, and all at once her muscles went limp and she couldn’t remember how to breathe anymore. Tendrils of pain curled in her gut, and she tried to will her nerves to withstand even this shock, but her knees gave out from under her.

With a painful thud, she fell face-first onto the floor, her vision swimming and her arms unable to move to shield herself from the fall. The room swirled around her and the back her mouth tasted like copper.

Catra was laughing.

Everything coalesced like a whirlpool into a single infinitely bright point… and was quiet.

Entrapta blinked as she stared at her cute little pancake - making machine. Something was… was different. She didn’t know what it was, exactly… but something was different. Unusual. Out of the ordinary. Something was  _ wrong _ , even. It was an odd feeling, not exactly something she had any real frame of reference for.

It wasn’t even like something  _ bad _ , per se -- only an eerily lingering sense that something was out of place. It was like looking at a motherboard that was missing a switch, or opening an engine and seeing the spark plugs jammed in upside down.

She frowned, sitting still and trying to rack her memory for what the source of this disturbance could be. Had she left something turned on back in the lab? Or maybe forgotten to turn something on?

Her memory -- even of the day just before -- seemed oddly fuzzy. It was like trying to remember the goings on from a time when one is bedridden with the flu. As much as she tried, it seemed like nothing was standing out.

Nothing, that is, except for  _ him _ .

Entrapta blinked.

Who was he? She didn’t know. She’d never seen him in her life. She didn’t even know if he was a  _ him _ , to be honest. Yet… she felt it, somehow.

His back stood towards her, in the memory that she now grasped, a memory that she had never formed and yet now stood out to her as brightly as day stands out from night. 

Entrapta cursed aloud. What was happening? Was she recalling a particularly vivid dream? Had she inhaled some kind of hallucinogen again? Maybe she’d fallen down the stairs on her way to the kitchen and this was all in her head, and her  _ real _ body was actually lying concussed and bleeding on the landing of the stairs.

He turned towards her, in the memory. She couldn’t remember the setting, where this had supposedly happened. It was like… a misty place, or something. The ground underfoot, she recalled, as being smooth and hard, like metal or finished tile.

He was saying something towards her, in a voice that she could both hear and not hear. His face, something she could both see and not see. His name, she knew, but could not recall.

Entrapta’s hair was standing all on end by this point, which for her meant that she was securely held in the middle of a vast ball of purple hair that filled up half of the kitchen, ready to defend her from any blow that might be directed her way.

None came, though. Instead… she felt lost. Not like  _ she _ was lost.  _ He _ was. She was supposed to be looking for him. That was what he wanted. Somehow. How she suddenly knew this, she didn’t know. She didn’t seem to know anything about her own memories anymore. Either this was a really vivid dream or an equally vivid hallucination: those were the only options remaining.

“How?” she asked aloud. “Where are you?  _ Who _ are you?”

Maybe ‘what are you’ would have been the better question, even. Not that any of her questions seemed to be doing any good regardless.

She sat up straight abruptly, suddenly remembering… more. Flashes of light and shadow flickered through her brain like pieces of a puzzle waiting to be assembled. She remembered … other people, even though she hadn’t seen any in person for over two decades now. She remembered them still.

“ _ You can do it, Entrapta _ ,” said a voice from out her struggling mind. 

She was standing now, as strange and conflicted thoughts of lab partners and oversized hair poofs flooded her brain from sources unknown.

She had to get to the bottom of this, and she had to get to the bottom  _ now _ . It was starting to get ludicrous. 

Leaving her breakfast on the table behind her, Entrapta rushed through the vents of Castle Dryl navigating through the walls and towards her lab as quickly as possible.

She didn’t even know where to  _ start _ once she got there, but yet… she was here, and already she felt better, being in the place where so much of her time was spent and so many fond memories were born.

Here was the place where she’d first deciphered that First Ones’ chip a while ago. It hadn’t seemed like it was going to work out at first, but then… maybe she’d gotten a bit lucky, but it’d just sort of … worked out after the fourth day of work on it. She’d just been lying bed, not even thinking about it at the time, when the answer to one of the equations had just… come to her, pretty much.

_ Maybe a brain scan _ ,” she reasoned with herself.

Yes, that seemed obvious. If something had gone terribly wrong with her own brain, that would be the way to know. You never know if rocket fumes had some kind of side effect or something… but there was only one way to find out.

He - the person in her memory - seemed agitated. His presence was stronger now, stronger than ever. Entrapta could have also said she could directly see him now, that was -- waitaminute, maybe that was the answer somehow.

If she  _ could _ see him, clearly, maybe it would jog her memory. Maybe it would help.

Forgetting about the brainscan, she ran to the other half of her lab and being digging through a load of scrap piles she’d left here in the past.

It wasn’t  _ much _ of a robot, as far as robots went. The insides of it were more perfunctory than not. She didn’t really put any effort to giving it any sort of sentience, either. Her efforts were more focused on the outside of it; rather. 

It was tall, much taller than she was -- though that wasn’t exactly a high bar anyway. Long pointed extrusions were on either side of it’s head. She presumed they were ears, and wired microphones into them. The head was an odd shape, as head shapes went, all tall and with deep, inset eyes that glowed through the mistiness of her memories like twin fires.

Not all that much time later, she finished, and took a step back to survey her creation.

It  _ was _ an accurate recreation of what her mind’s eye saw, down to the last centimeter of armspan. 

But what  _ was _ it? A soldier? The sharp angles and seemingly robust build communicated that such might well be true. Some kind of worker? The apparent reinforcement of the joists and the pressured cooling vents could point to that? Was it a  _ person _ , a partner, a friend? The strange unease lurking in her gut seemed to feel so.

She stared into the eyes of her creation, not even sure what she was expecting. It couldn’t speak: she hadn’t given the capability to produce sounds. Heck, it didn’t even have the AI necessary to form complex thought. It was nothing more than a machine, through and through. Unfeeling, unthinking, unliving.

Yet she stared at it in the way a drowning person might stare at the shore - somehow hoping desperately that this was the key that would make everything make sense.

Memories rushed into her mind like a flood, and with the force of one great that she nearly fell to her knees. Places she’d never seen, people she’d never met, voices she’d never heard all gushed headlong in particular order to the forefront of her consciousness.

She remembered herself, involved in some kind of fight.

She remembered robots.

She remembered meeting people, all sorts of them.

She remembered foggy coastlines and abandoned jungles.

She couldn’t make of sense of any of it.

A presence lurked behind her, so strong that her hair tingled and instinctively barricaded behind her, forming a living wall that would have been able to stop a bullet, had any come. She turned around. 

Nothing was there - nothing that she could see, anyway. Maybe it was in the junkpiles that she’d piled up against the wall, there?

There were boxes upon boxes upon piles of miscellaneous bits and bobs of every possible type littered there, accumulated over the years of use this lab had seen. Still, she dug, ever farther into the pile - dug until her fingers brushed against the wall behind it.

Well, not the wall, per se, but something that was mounted onto it. An obsolete sort of computer terminal was there, buried out of sight underneath the years of tiny food wrappers and sheets of warped scrap metal. Blowing the dust on it aside, she ran her gloved hand over the surface of the cracked screen built in.

Her eyes widened as the memory of its purpose suddenly came back to her - a memory that, in contrast with all the rest - she could actually remember making.

And then suddenly everything began making sense again.

The tall figure in the cape, glowering from her  _ other _ memories, seemed to smile on her.

This was a spatiotemporal offset redivisor manifold. To put things simply, it was something she’d built when she was young and had just recently been enamored with the idea of dimensions existing on planes beyond Etheria -- entirely new worlds that existed not just in a different places in space, but in different places in  _ time _ , dimensions that adhered to not just height, length, and depth, but to yet more.

Gloved fingers shaking, she hardbooted the machine from it’s decades of slumber. The vacuum tubes whirred in protest and a faint smell of smoke drifted through the air. She didn’t care, though: everything was becoming clear, and she was determined to see it to the end.

The readouts on the screen were antiquated, produced by a system so far out of date that she could even smell the inferior code running it’s hood. But they were good enough, and by ‘good enough’, she meant that they were  _ unmistakable _ .

Something was happening to space and time. The plane of existence had been horribly snarled by some great disturbance, and it had torn… torn as the flow of time attempted to drag itself onward, only to find itself unable. It was like trying to pull out a piece of paper jammed into a printer. Nothing good happened, save for the paper itself rending in twain.

The universe itself was that paper, though.

It was rending in twain.

Everything was falling into place all of the sudden. The disturbance, the energy source that it would have had to be… the memories she’d been having.

They were only fragments, but fragments of what? Fragments of another dimension seeping through into her own as her own pulled itself apart at the seams. Somebody hadn’t properly accounted for the energy needed to hold a portal stable for more than a microsecond, and the stress of the portal fluctuating so had ripped apart the fabric of space and time.

… how had she known it was a portal?

_ Because she could remember it _ .

She remembered a portal. It had been something  _ she _ had built.

It had been built by her, though not right up from scratch. It had been intended to breach other dimensions. Which it had… done, in a sense. But a  _ wrong _ sense. A terribly wrong one. It’d rifted reality… it had rifted reality so badly that an entire divergent timeline had been spawned because of it. A timeline where the portal had never been created, so it seemed, for such was the only way to avoid instant dissolution of the universe.

Not that it helped much in the long run. Divergent timelines sprang out of collapsing dimensions like rats fleeing a sinking ship. It was all in the self-repairing nature of the universe. And divergent timelines… well, they were just that, and never very stable to begin with.

And her? She was a part of the system. How much of her life had she actually lived? And how much of it had just been copy-pasted into reality as fractured timelines split apart from one another?

At the end of the day, it didn’t matter. Nothing much did, and her least of all. She wasn’t even  _ real _ , just a single bubble in the surging sea of space and time, created in an instant by some great disturbance, and soon to be extinguished in a manner just as quick and unfathomable.

“Well, then, you really screwed up this time, real Entrapta,” she murmured. What had happened? She couldn’t remember it all.

She remembered other people, hosts of them from every walk of life. She remembered war. The same war that had been going on outside her castle, too -- but apparently in real life she’d gotten involved in it somehow, too.

She remembered being dragged into all, almost against her will, and being tossed about between both sides as they both clamored to have access to her skills without ever stopping to consider the person attached to those skills.

Until she’d met  _ him _ .

She remembered the time spent together.

She remembered the partnership between them.

She remembered building the portal.

She remembered all this, but yet, knew also that it had not happened -- not in this dimension, and not to her. 

She remembered a fight.

She remembered a powerful electric shock, one that curdled her blood and turned her bones to jelly.

She remembered  _ betrayal _ . The princesses didn’t want her. The Fright Zone didn’t want her.

She remembered everything, now.

The perfect life she’d led was a lie, pasted into her memory by a branching timeline. The perfect world she lived in was a faux, duplicated from the real thing. How had this all happened? What, exactly, had managed to do all this?

It didn’t matter. 

There was so much science left to be done, so many experiments to carry out, so much dissection to be had. 

Entrapta’s hair had found a full bottle of soda lying on the floor of her lab. She picked it up and opened it, guzzling it down and trying to tell herself it was the shock of the carbonation that was squeezing water from her eyes.

She had come so close already to discovering the secrets of the First One’s tech. It was possible, she knew. She could do it, given enough time.

She was going to have to leave that up to Real Entrapta, though. For her, there was no time left at all.

Footsteps sounded behind her, and she hastily wiped her streaking face with her hair.

She turned, and saw faces: faces that she’d never seen before, and yet shone so brilliantly from her memory it was like she’d seen them yesterday.

At long last, names clicked into place, and the picture was complete.

Entrapta lowered herself on a tendril of hair. 

“Adora, Glimmer,” she said, her tongue stumbling over words that she’d never before spoken but that felt as right as rain regardless. She’d never said them before now, but was sure beyond all doubt they were absolutely correct. “I knew you were coming after all.”


End file.
